Pros
Hubspot is user-friendly, attractive, and useful for different levels of expertise. We use it for the website, blog, social media, email, and CRM.
The content around the software is fantastic, with active blogs for different user groups, detailed guidance for how to use functionalities and what you could use them for, and templates to help you tackle projects. They provide a lot of resources to help you get the best out of Hubspot, and if you're stuck, the customer support is responsive and helpful.
Something I particularly like about Hubspot is how actively they are developing it. It seems to be every month that we receive an update of new features, functionality or integrations. They have recently added the ability to manage multiple currencies, which people had been really actively asking for on the community forum, and I was so pleased to see this added. Hubspot clearly listen to the feedback and suggestions from the community.
Cons
There are some things which are a bit inflexible. For example, the Industry field for Companies is very large and has a lot of industries which would never be relevant to us. I would like to be able to delete or at least hide features and information which we never use and would never use.
Our email is on Outlook Exchange, which unfortunately means we are unable to use some of Hubspot's functions, like being able to email from within the platform and the Meetings function, which I would love to be able to use.
Overall, I would definitely recommend Hubspot to any business who wants to keep records of client data and communication.
Pros
This software has made my life so much easier! With automatic email logging and the ability to make notes, log phone calls and other important documents, Hubspot keeps all of my important information in one place. Hubspot gives me the ability to store all my clients details, their company details and all my communication with them in one bit of software. This makes it easy to look back over whenever I need to and keep up to date with what's going on. Hubspot also has the ability to have multiple team members within one account. Although this isn't something I use currently, it is something I have used in the past. This feature is wonderful for all team members to see emails both incoming and outgoing from customers / clients and is a life saver for looking back over email / telephone communications say if a team member is off ill and their client needs looking after for a few days.
Hubspot has also been updated to comply with GDPR standards.
A key positive for Hubspot for me is the knowledge that my collected data will stay in Hubspot for as long as I keep the software. As I am looking to take on employees within the next year, these new team members will be able to learn about exiting customers / clients through the information stored in Hubspot.
Cons
It can be a little pricy for individuals. Personally, I went back to the free plan after not feeling I got my moneys worth out of the more advanced plan.
Hubspot doesn't always integrate with other software you may have, or sometimes it will integrate but not as well as you would like.
I use Spark email for OS. Although Hubspot does still track my outgoing and incoming email, if I BCC clients into an email, this isn't tracked in Hubspot. This can be a little annoying but it's not a deal breaker for me.
Time, Insights and the most personalized communications with any Sales Qualified Leads assigned to me. I can see what website pages they have viewed, the emails they opened or click on, the content offers they have downloaded, their social media profiles and their company information.
This is really useful when you are trying to reach a contact but not come across as "salesy" or "sleazy." You can tailor your outreach to the things you know they are most interested in because the HubSpot CRM gives you all that information in one single Contact Record.
The tracking capabilities are as great as the HubSpot Marketing Platform's tracking capabilities. This makes the entire cycle of creating brand awareness and expertise to increase your sales opportunities and customers, so simple and seamless.
You can tie everything back to the overall ROI for your business, which is what most executives care about. They need bottom-line results, and the HubSpot CRM already provides you with these bottom line reports with charts, numbers and professional look.
Pros
I love how everything about a contact is all in one place. From the first moment, they visit your website, to every conversion they've made on your website, all contacts with the company they've had, any meetings, calls, or emails. It's all right there in the Contact Record of the CRM.
This helps the marketing and sales team implement "Smarketing" in a seamless manner. Sales reps have all the marketing data in order to tailor their sales approach to a contact. Marketing has all the sales qualification necessities to add to their lead scoring system, so they can intelligently pass off marketing qualified leads to the sales team once they reach a specific score.
It tracks all the sales representative's performance, interactions, productivity and more. This helps sales managers know what their team is doing and how well they are doing at all times.
You also have a Deals section, where you can track all sales opportunities that have potential to become a customer and their path to either becoming a customer or a lost sales opportunity. That gives HubSpot the ability to better forecast your sales month-to-month for bottom line reports.
I love how you can call a contact directly from their contact record in the CRM, record it, take notes, and see all the information in front of you while you're speaking to them. That helps sales professionals increase their sales calls productivity and outcomes.
The HubSpot CRM can also integrate with your Gmail and Office 365.
Cons
The downside to the CRM is the limitation of integrating with your Gmail or Office 365. If you do not have your email or business hosted by Google/Gmail or Office 365, then it cannot fully integrate into your email system. The ability to have all the features of the HubSpot CRM right within your Inbox saves a lot of time and hassle of having to open up the HubSpot CRM and perform your tasks and communications there with a SQL.
There's the option to use IMAP with Microsoft Exchange if your company is hosted by another platform but still uses Microsoft 16 Exchange for your email service. But the drawback to this is that it is a bumpy road to setting up, and you do not have all the features and capabilities that you would have normally with Office 365 and a Business Gmail Account.
The price is also a common issue. HubSpot offers a free CRM but there are great limitations to this free CRM. It forces you to pay for the Sales Pro which is costly to add on to your other costs for the HubSpot platform such as the HubSpot CMS, MAP & Marketing.
With that being said, there are other CRMs that integrate with the HubSpot platform as an alternative and cheaper solution to having a robust CRM. The best one I have seen accomplish this is the BlueCamroo CRM.
I am an inbound marketing exec who uses HubSpot on a daily basis. The company I work for, Strategic IC, is a B2B digital marketing agency that helps clients generate qualified leads via inbound marketing and sales, social media and open source web development. We are a Platinum Certified HubSpot partner and therefore also promote the use of HubSpot to our own clients. We use HubSpot to run various different Inbound campaigns, and create lots of landing pages, blogs, workflows etc through HubSpot. HubSpot is used throughout the whole of the company and is a very easy and intelligent tool to use.
The biggest pro is that the HubSpot CRM is completely free! It is well worth using and trying out to see if it suits all of your needs before upgrading to any other packages. I find the CRM tool to be very intuitive - it really helps when tracking what a contact has been doing, for example if an email has been delivered into their inbox, or whether they have read the email etc. Additionally, the dashboards provided by the CRM are a very helpful snapshot of your metrics, however I do feel they could provide a lot more depth.
There are only a few cons to the HubSpot CRM - sometimes it can be slow at loading changes to the database and occasionally it does crash and needs to be refreshed multiple times before it returns to normal. Also there is a big jump in price (from free) to add on the reporting features, which can put some clients off upgrading the tool further.
Pros
CRM is completely free, until you want to upgrade and add more features.
Really easy way to easily keep track of all contact and see what actions they have been taking.
Very intuitive tool.
Helpful snapshot of metrics with the dashboards.
Cons
There are only a few cons to the HubSpot CRM - sometimes it can be slow at loading changes to the database and occasionally it does crash and needs to be refreshed multiple times before it returns to normal.
There is a big jump in price (from free) to adding on the additional features such as reporting features.
Pros
You can customize the filters and save the ones that are needed in the campaign. You can create custom views so you can focus on key indicators or particular type of lead so the representatives can focus on the right people that match the potential leads or customers for your service or product. You can easily track the progress through recent email clicks, recent sales email replied date. Customize the dispositions in order to manage your leads effectively and efficiently. What's best in Hubspot CRM is you can give your representatives a goal and you can create action steps to take every week in order to maximize your sales potential and not miss on buyers. You can easily track the type of industry , type of buyers that highly match your buyer criteria. There are numerous features and when used depending on the lead status effectively, you can surely see sales progress without missing a single potential sale. Instead of working on thousands of leads,your representatives will be working on only hundreds but sure sale.
Cons
Management should all be trained on each feature and identify significant filters and customs that fit your campaign and client metrics. Your representatives should be trained well on the software. I advise you hire tech savvy Sales representatives at the same time fast learners. It takes time to perfect the system and some may not use some important features and just use common features because they need to call more people.
We work all more aligned, we do not lose any information on the customer, we can trace the history of the various points of cotnatto that a customer or a prospect has had with the different departments, we simplify the life and work becomes less stressful with this tool under but no.
In addition, integration with the marketing side makes it fly, allowing a truly segmentation of contacts based on their behavior and interactions with our digital content.
Pros
We are 20 people and CRM is the cornerstone of every communication and interaction with the customer: HubSpot CRM has allowed us to rediscover the centrality of the individual - contact, without having to get lost among various software and email accounts
On the contact we find logging in automatic: the emails sent and the answers to these emails, phone calls and scheduled appointments (which also go into Google Calendar). For us, it is an out-of-the-ordinary tool for this timeline on the contact, that allows us to "know" even prospects with which other people in the company have never had anything to do.
The deals are also a very well thought out and easy to manage tool.
The fact that the basic functions are free and there is no cost per seat ... well, it makes it an extraordinary tool
Cons
In order to have access to complete and in-depth reporting, ie a Business Intelligence able to show all information and data to understand various aspects of our company, we have to go towards advanced paid-level reporting. Not bad considering that everything else is free.
The biggest benefit is getting a fleshed out CRM without spending a dime. For a small organization, this is a huge benefit because you can start immediately implementing the CRM and getting into the habit of taking notes and managing customers. Later on you might want to migrate to a different CRM, but in the meantime, this is a no risk situation to get started and actually is better than a lot of paid CRMs out there.
Pros
My favorite thing about this software is that it's free. It made choosing a CRM an easy decision, and we have stuck with it since we made it. I like that it's easy to customize just about anything in terms of fields and that there are no limits on doing that.
I also enjoy the templates and email tracking feature, which supposedly has a limit in the free account but I somehow continue to get notifications when people open my emails.
Another favorite aspect that keeps me coming back to it is the Deals area - having a kanban board for deals is immensely helpful, and we use that heavily along with quota and forecasting reports related to it. There isn't a better way to get a snapshot on how your business is doing than to just look a kanban board of all your open deals and where they are in the pipeline.
Cons
Some of the software can seem a bit old and clunky, like a lot of CRMs. I miss the social autofilling options that Prosperworks has, and I don't find there to be anything particularly special about the user interface. Lists of contacts and navigating through a profile doesn't look especially modern, but it does get the job done.
It's hard to be upset with any of those issues though because well, it's free. For free, it does an amazing job.
We manage to use it day by day. But it's clear that Hubspot CRM isn't built for a fast moving, largely phone sales oriented company like ours. It's perhaps better for something with a long sales cycle. For a sales rep who has 15 prospects he's working, not 200.
Pros
I tried to like how well it worked with our hubspot automation software.
Cons
That nothing in Hubspot CRM was setup for the use of sales people.
First off, the permission settings are a joke. Either people have access to everything, or nothing. And even if they have access to nothing, they can still SEE everything, just not edit it.
Second, Tasks. A pretty standard tool of the sales rep is the tasks piece of software. Tasks in Hubspot don't really have anything to do with the sales rep. Except, that a sales rep can't call the task, unless he owns the contact. Seems simple right? But when you fire a sales rep, you can't move their contacts and tasks together. So the only way to ensure you do this correctly is one at a time. My company gets a few hundred leads a day, so this is extremely unpleasant.
Third is support. Often I call to ask how to do something, say to switch 1000 contacts and tasks over to a new sales rep. Or something simple. I'm initially told that it's easy, then put on hold. Then told it's not possible. As if nobody at Hubspot has ever actually used Hubspot.
I have 4+ years of experience using HubSpot, day in and day out, and have used it extensively both in-house and with multiple clients of all different sizes. I also have significant experience with other CRMs including Marketo, Pardot, and Salesforce. I say that HubSpot is still the top CRM and marketing software platform in the industry for the features listed above, but also for their responsive and fast-acting customer support team. Overall I highly recommend HubSpot.
Pros
The user tracking functionalities out-of-the-box are unmatched. It's very easy to track what leads do in your website and it's random-to-known lead matching technology is great. Building your website within the HubSpot ecosystem will yield a fast website that is easy to edit, that follows SEO best practices and is extremely stable all around. And the marketing automation features are simply one of the best in the industry.
Cons
The reporting functionalities aren't great. There are many small little details and limitations in different tools that doesn't make sense to most folks and makes you wonder why HubSpot doesn't allow it. Sometimes implementing conversion goal tracking from other systems isn't as easy as it could be. Lastly, some of the pricing tiers and features don't make complete sense to me and the software can get pretty expensive if you have too many contacts in your database.
Pros
I like that HubSpot practices what it preaches. They educate customers (and the public) in inbound marketing techniques, the very techniques they're using themselves to earn customers! The product itself is easy to use and intuitive. Whenever we think up something we want to do (a specific tactic or approach), we always know that HubSpot can accommodate that idea. What I like best is the seamless way in which we can manage all of our blogging, website, social media, and enews all in one platform and see all of the analytics in that same place. Everyday we are logging into Hubspot to schedule social media posts, blogs, edit automated workflows, and more. Other staff use the tool for a monthly touchpoint email they send to their lists of contacts. And weekly, we send our FatherSource enewsletter from within HubSpot using the email templates. Further, HubSpot integrates with our Salesforce CRM, and provides valuable information to our sales staff, which can help them better help our customers/potential customers. We assign leads that come through HubSpot and feed into Salesforce for personal follow-up from NFI staff.
Cons
As for what I like least: nothing! Seriously. We couldn't be as successful as we are today without this tool. We have two people managing our marketing and Hubspot acts as a third person. Before HubSpot we were using Constant Contact, The Raisers Edge contact database, Blogspot, and Blackbaud Net Community for our website, and posting separately on twitter, Facebook, and linked in. Now we can do all of this in one place! If I had to choose one thing I like least, it's that there is a not a plug-in for drafting, distributing, and monitoring press releases and incorporating them into overall marketing campaigns. I think HubSpot could help us be more efficient in this way. Fortunately, this deficiency isn't not really a major concern for us.
HubSpot CRM it's Simple, Powerful and able to scale with your organisation, what more can you wish for? Not only the platform offers a great experience, but the support is great as well. They have great idea's and are always there to help you out.
of course, they have some small isues every once in a wile, but it's all wel wordt it
Pros
To start off with Hubspot is Simple and Powerful. With their easy to use interface, you can get the overview and contact information you need and this is even customizable per user.
Hubspot also offers a great In-Sync with their Marketing, sales and service Hub, because all systems use the same database.
Hubspot is a great solution that offers a product for business with a growth ambition and is able to grow along with them
HubSpot CRM (and other tools) are constantly in development, so features that you miss might come soon. it's great to work with a tool that adapts to the changing demand and technology.
Cons
In my opinion there are no real cons for working with Hubspot. But there is something you have to consider (or learn to live with). Hubspot is a fast-moving company that releases new features on in a fast passed.
the downside of this is that new features are not as must buildout as you should wish they were.
The tool is unusual in terms of use at the beginning. We have gone through a lot of pieces of training and read a lot of documentation, and finally, we have increased the number of customers by to 20 percent thanks to improved communication. The support team has helped us a lot. The program is suitable for marketing purposes only in the most expensive version, all others are only partially designed for that, so consider it when choosing the best one for you. Generally, there are no problems that can not be resolved, so give it a try.
Pros
"An excellent solution for those who want to keep everything on their eyes.
Within this CRM program, you can manage communication, do marketing and collect statistics.
Sales managers can monitor at which stage is the process of product promotion, how many deals are concluded, have info on them etc. You can also schedule e-mailing."
Cons
File storage is a bit complicated. They are difficult to find something using a search engine, as well as to replace files and especially attach them to messages. Emails often do not get to their addresses, therefore, we had to look for other services for correspondence. The interface causes some problems because it is not always convenient, for example, it is impossible to copy the contact information of customers. You just have to type it.
HubSpot CRM integrates other softwares like Gmail, and keeps communication seemless between staff and leads. The very friendly interface is invaluable - it's hard enough having a lot to do, I'd rather not spend weeks trying to figure out how to use a CRM well - and the software is robust. I can assign team members to leads, create deadlines, and know every interaction that a lead has had with us, all in one location.
Pros
This software is very comprehensive as far as data tracking contacts, keeping organized with what contacts different staff is assigned, and communication methods built-in with the CRM. The ease of use is incredibly well thought out and appreciated.
Cons
My only gripe is that this software doesn't cater more to non-profits. I wish I could track financial data and more "donor-esque" information, but even some of that I am manually able to add fields for. Definitely not for donor tracking, though.
Hello James!
Thank you for finding the time to write such a detailed review of our product, we really appreciate your feedback!
I'm glad to hear that you find the CRM easy to use and comprehensive!
As far as room for improvement - I think your comments about making the product more nonprofit friendly are super interesting! If you have more ideas on this we would love to hear more about them at [email protected]!
Thank you again James for the review!
Pros
I love the Hubspot sidekick in my gmail and can't imagine not having it, to be honest. Great for tracking opens of my emails and logging communication records for each contact. From a sales/account side it's a godsend. I also like the use of templates and scheduling emails for future sending. I have recommended this tool to many people (clients, etc) so far.
Cons
One of the biggest reasons I signed up for the CRM tool was the ability to add prospects to my CRM with a click from the prospect's website. The little sprocket icon would always be floating on the side of my browser and if I wanted to add the website/company to the database, I clicked it, it pulled public info about them into one panel, and I added it all to the CRM. This feature has disappeared (I believe because of Europe's GDPR law) and that is a massive disappointment. I've been looking for a replacement ever since that feature disappeared. This might be more for the "Hubspot Sales" product but they all tie together. I also used to be able to search a global database of companies by industry, size, etc and add them to my sales prospecting list but that also disappeared. If I find something like that with similar email features, I will likely switch.
Also many of the sidekick features are not available in Gmail mobile, only desktop, which is a bummer.
I have been using Hubspot CRM for a year now. In my company we are seven different business units and each business unit is kind of ran like an independent company so the challenge to have them all in one CRM was compelling. Some of the business units had never have a CRM before and some other were using different ones: I had 3 using vTiger, a free Open Source CRM, and another one SAP.
I started the migration of CRM with the business unit with most experiencie on the use of vTiger CRM. The migration went on pretty smoothly for my surprise and mostly everyone was happy with the change specially because of the ease of use. I do had to create some training slides and get together all the sales group to train them, but after that session mostly everyone started working on the CRM without problems.
I then followed with the rest of the business units and Hubspot has been working perfectly, but.. I do have some complains from the users which have more to do with the way we do business than with the CRM itself.
Since we are different business units but usuaaly work with the same customers, we have a problem assigning one owner to each contact. We would need each contact to be able to have multiple owners that can help us create filters accordingly to the owner. Right now we are not able to do it and I have lots of complains about since because of it I need to have everyone being able to see or edit all contacts, not only the ones assigned to them.
Besides this, Hubspot CRM is a great tool and very easy of using.
We are still waiting for the App for Android though!
Pros
Ease of use
On the cloud
iOS App
Easy migration of information
Cons
You can´t have more than one owner per contact
We are a professional employer organization. We have a small sales team that is spread across the country. We have a small marketing team as well. Our sales team was not using our prior CRM. It felt like a tax they had to pay in order to make sales. This CRM actually helps them sell. They love using it. They like the simplicity and they like how it reduces the amount of manual data entry they have to do. We also were trying to find a way to build our proposal information gathering process into our CRM and the flexibility of this CRM and the integrations with things like google drive and zapier made it possible. Combining this tool with the HS marketing platform is just an incredible combination. Real time fully integrated databases with our sales and marketing team make us more in-sync. It has allows us to worry about selling and marketing instead of our data.
Pros
The built in notifications. The clean design. Visual drag and drop deal stages. Custom field options. Web form integrations. Other web app integrations. Sales tools. Timeline layout is great for contextual selling.
Cons
Early on there was some challenges with importing our old data into the tool because of their email requirements, but that has been resolved.
The ability to track our leads from an earlier stage than we previously did is allowing us to analyse our earliest interactions with the customer and to devise new strategies to enhance that customer experience and identify which of our staff are really excelling.
We still need to take advantage of all the features available to us, but those that we have embraced have made our work a lot more simple and focussed on our core objectives.
Pros
It covers everything we want to do from Forms, Email Templates, and Landing Pages to Customer Surveys, Ticketing and Chatbots.
The free version offers a lot more functionality than I would expect and you can get quite far with it.
The paid features are competitively priced and are easy to pick up and use.
The support team is amazing, on chat, email or phone support, they always reply swiftly and their team all seem to be well versed with the product and able to assist with a wide range of issues.
New features are developed and rolled out regularly, and are not always at an additional cost.
Cons
The one gripe I currently have is the inability to separate viewing permissions for Contacts and Deals associated with those Contacts. In our specific context thats quite important.
However since we encountered this issue the separation of ownership of Contacts and Deals was implemented, so I am hopeful this will be amended in the near future.
We've been using this product since it was released. It has been constantly upgraded and new features are added all the time. For what we do, B2B sales, it is almost all we need. The fact it is integrated with the Hubspot Marketing means you do very little data entry. It takes less than an hour for us to set it up for new clients, compared to many, many months for other more complex systems we've implemented.
Strong Points:
Does a lot of work for you, keeping you from having do a lot of data entry. The meetings tool has resulted in a lot of customer engagement that would have not happened without it.
The templates and sequences are a great help and really make you think about what you want to say and how you want to say it to customers.
The ability to modify the Sales Pipeline stages is very helpful and the ability to create different sales pipelines is also very critical.
The available free training is also a great addition to the tool.
Weak Points:
The lack of a Configure, Price and Quote system means you have to buy a third party system if you want to actually be able to close deals from within the tool.
The mobile app is constantly being improved but needs a few additional pieces of functionality.
The ability to call from within the app is great however, it lacks the management systems large volume call centers require. It isn't really the same as an Inbound Call Center application and users should bear that in mind.
When I first started my job I took many of the HubSpot Academy courses, which was similar to taking an online marketing course in college. This helped me to gain an understanding of the software. With HubSpot we are able to easily monitor leads throughout the buyer's journey, as they move down the funnel. We can keep track of all of our tasks and deadlines, and provide content to our viewers.
Pros
HubSpot is great because it's an all-inclusive software for our marketing needs. We use HubSpot for all of our emails, blogs, and landing pages. The Workflows tool allows us to easily track lead engagement. We're able to manage and track our marketing efforts like never before. I find HubSpot much easier to use than WordPress, where our website is hosted. Possibly the best part of using HubSpot is the customer support! At times the wait can be long, but I always reach an actual person, and they are so helpful and nice! If they don't know how to do something they always look into it and get back to you via email. They're lifesavers!
Cons
The software can do so much that there is still a lot to learn. When creating contacts HubSpot has a tendency to fill in the missing information with what it can find on the internet, which is not always accurate. Sometimes there are features I would like to use that HubSpot doesn't have, like it only allows one level of progressive profiling in forms, and one level of subtasks in Projects. Sometimes the Design Manager and Page Editor can be difficult to work with.
As agency partners, we use and recommend HubSpot, and have been using the whole growth stack for a around 3 years.
With Hubspot we now have a fully integrated platform that it used by all members of the company across all teams - aligning sales and marketing.
With HubSpot sales everyone in the business - not just sales -gains clarity on what's in the pipeline, what the priorities are, how qualified each lead is - and we can track all nurture actions and engagements back easily.
If you're planning to do inbound marketing and sales effectively this software gives you all you need in one spot.
In addition to the sales platform and CRM, we use huspot to manage out marketing - bear in mind that everything is hubspot is closed loop so we can align out sales efforts with our content management, social management, paid ads, marketing automation, reporting and more.
Pros
Easy to use, good range of integrations, closed loop reporting, good training and support - clarity on responsibility for all our team across departments.
Cons
Not much - it would be nice to see a few more integrations with other CRM and sales platforms, and other 3rd party tools like chat, but there are always new updates such as these being rolled out by HubSpot.
This is a great value-added service for the Hubspot website hosting and CMS. I am not sure of how useful it would be as a stand-alone product. The add-ons for Microsoft Outlook and Google Chrome browsers are work being installed and loaded every time you start these applications.
You do get some great insights into the activity of leads, prospects, and customers. Emails sent have reports that beat most CRM and Email delivery systems in that you can see within the record how contacts are interacting with your emails and content.
The HubSpot CRM made it easy for me to suggest moving our marketing automation needs to HubSpot as it adds another level of information for my salespeople in that we are all using the same contact records and can easily share information.
Pros
I love that my interactions with a client easily can be shared with the sales team
The permission levels make sense on the sales side for access to Marketing modules as well
The emails send reliably with great tracking features
Cons
It is expensive if you are looking at it as strictly a CRM- it does take on a lot of other parts of your business development and outreach- so consider that
You do need to have at least one committed user in the software, keeping up to date on the new features and how to use it
We were looking for a more unified solution, rather than jamming different products together to achieve our goals, and HubSpot has moved us much further along in that. The integrations we do use are quite elegant and don't feel awkward to use.
So much so that one of the criteria I'll asses when looking at products is if it has a HubSpot integration.
Pros
HubSpot CRM is great! There's lots of options for customising contact and company properties, including the forms that appear when a user of the CRM creates or views the users.
The ability to filter by company properties to view contacts who belong to companies matching those filters is really useful for us and other systems we've tried struggled to do this.
So many products integrate with HubSpot, and the tools for managing communications really help keep the whole team up to date with what's going on with each of our clients.
Cons
As with all standard software each user invariably wants to use it differently. Especially when the users of the software are spread across different sectors, and HubSpot seems to be used across them all.
The biggest challenge we face is the way HubSpot handles contacts who are at multiple organisations. There's a partial workaround that they have developed since the problem was raised which is good, but it can cause a bit of a headache sometimes.
We are solving forecasting, deal tracking, taking notes, assigning and completing tasks, automating workflows for things like sending emails when someone fills out a form on our website (which is also hosted on Hubspot). Overall it has been very positive and helps our team be more productive and improve the alignment of sales and marketing, which is more crucial than even as customers are travelling further and further down the buying journey before ever reaching out to a sales rep, so having good content and the ability to target prospects in a way that is more customized to their demonstrated interest its very compelling.
Pros
We switched from Zoho CRM. What I like most is that the CRM is so tightly integrated with the Hubspot marketing platform that it makes gathering context about a prospect before reaching out very easy. The interface is intuitive, and it integrates with Google Mail and Outlook, making adding and modify contacts, tasks, etc., very easy. It has a REST API so it is easy to integrate with other systems that do as well.
Cons
They need to focus on things like building quotes, adding a voicemail drop feature, and it can get to be pretty expensive with all the bells and whistles (the Enterprise edition).
As a marketer, I already liked the HubSpot CRM because it made a lot of sense to me. However, I was totally sold on it the moment my sales rep said "it's just so much easier to use than everything I've used before." Seeing my sales rep actually USE the CRM and not skip inputing information in fields or anything is so great. Plus, a lot of things that are manual (even with an integrated system like HubSpot and Salesforce) are just already done for him in the HubSpot CRM. The whole HubSpot sales suite (including what was formerly called Sidekick) makes our jobs easier and saves us time. In fact, because of the way we have everything set up, every time a PPC lead comes in and my sales rep qualifies and then responds to it - I can see in the contact's timeline if the person has opened the email yet or not! Overall, it's just a really great tool that's so user-friendly the sales reps will actually use it.
Pros
The HubSpot CRM is built for the mind of a sales rep. It is meant to be usable and it truly is. I used to have sales reps forgetting fields, skipping fields, being late on reports, etc. But with the HubSpot CRM everything is seamless, easy, and we can all find what we need. Plus, with the new inbound sales certification I know my sales reps will use the software in an inbound way to sell the way people want to be sold to now.
Cons
The only cons I have are that the reporting is still lacking.. With the reports add on it's better but this should really be included with the CRM or at least included if you're using the HubSpot marketing piece already. Also, it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate offline sources from online/inbound sources unless you're looking at a report broken down by sources. There's not really an easy way that I've found to show all "marketing generated leads" that weren't prospected by sales, within your other reports.
It has been great. Our department is very lean, so HubSpot helps us accomplish more than we thought we were capable of. Our sales people were a bit hesitant at first, but now they are starting to see how helpful HubSpot can be for them.
Pros
It gives you everything you need to be a successful marketer. From social scheduling to full blown email automation, there are a handful of tools that will help you improve your marketing efforts while saving time.
On the CRM side, our sales people are truly starting to see the benefit. They are using features such as Tasks to keep themselves organized, and Sequences to automate time-consuming email follow ups. Most importantly, the CRM has helped us connect our marketing efforts to bottom-line revenue, which is why we purchased the software in the first place.
Cons
There is some useful functionality missing. For instance, it would benefit me greatly if HubSpot could track Marketing email replies. Many of my sales reps have been working with their customers for 20+ years, so instead of clicking a CTA button or link, they tend to reply to an email.
This hurts us in workflows because there have been several occasions where a contact should have been unenrolled because an email was replied to. However, since HubSpot can't track that, the contacts whom replied end up receiving the next email in the workflow instead of being unenrolled, causing them confusion and making us look crazy.
I use it every day, and I am still constantly learning new things and finding new ways to use it and make my work easier. I am definitely a Hubspot champion.